Wheal Mary Ann

Overview

A Menheniot silver-lead mine on the same lode as neighbouring Wheal Trelawney, worked under a cloud from its 1845 founding: the sett itself, granted to three men nominally in trust for Trelawney's shareholders, was the subject of a Chancery suit before Mary Ann had raised any ore of her own. Once resolved, and under Captain Peter Clymo's management, it became one of the most productive lead-silver mines in the district, worked to at least 250 fathoms before closing around 1875. The site was the scene of a serious rescue in 2007, when a volunteer clearing the old Footway Shaft was trapped by a trench collapse.

History

Farming was the mainstay of Menheniot parish until lead was found nearby and Wheal Trelawney was set to work in 1843. Wheal Mary Ann took the ground immediately south, on the same lode, and was named for its owner, Miss Mary Ann Pollard. Peter Clymo, later recalling the mine's founding, said the lode had first been found by a man named Rickard Sowden; Trelawney's own landlord, Charles Trelawny, had refused a sett to Sowden's party without a more substantial backer coming forward, so Trelawney went ahead first and Mary Ann followed in 1845. The founding of Mary Ann was contested almost from the outset. Pollard would not grant the adjoining sett to the Trelawney company directly, so it was granted in July 1845 to three men acting, the Trelawney adventurers understood, on their behalf: Peter Clymo (Trelawney's purser), James Clymo and the company's solicitor Edward Lyne. The three grantees instead proposed to keep a majority of the new mine's shares for themselves. A group of Trelawney shareholders, led by a Mr O. H. Smith, filed a bill in Chancery; the dispute went to arbitration before Captain W. Richards of Redruth and Captain W. Francis of United Mines, with a Tavistock banker, J. Rundle, as umpire. Their award, given in October-November 1846, found for the Trelawney shareholders pro rata and ordered Clymo and Lyne to pay all costs of the suit, reported at the time as amounting to some £1,500. Once the ownership question was settled the mine prospered under Clymo's management. By September 1859, when the adventurers presented him with a silver salver worth £75 in recognition of his 'able management of this adventure from its commencement,' Wheal Mary Ann had paid dividends totalling £48,512 — £47 7s 6d on each original share, some six times the capital subscribed. Clymo went on to manage South Caradon Mine as well. A detailed account in the Mining and Smelting Magazine in 1862, when the mine was sixteen years old, put monthly returns at about 60 tons of best ore (worth roughly £25 a ton) and 25 tons of seconds (about £10 a ton), raised from workings that had by then reached a nominal 216 fathoms below surface. Ore was raised through Pollard's and Clymo's shafts, both sunk vertically, with Barratt's shaft following the course of the lode itself; drainage and winding were on the Cost Book System usual to Cornish mining, with miners working underground pitches on tribute and tutwork. An 1863 inspection for Lord Kinnaird's Royal Commission on the condition of mines recorded both principal shafts down 205 fathoms, worked with kibbles and connected by a dedicated footway shaft and ladderways to the adit. By 1874, when the geologist C. Le Neve Foster visited underground to record the structure of the lode, workings had reached the 250 fathom level and the mine was, in his words, 'on the point of being abandoned.' Wheal Mary Ann appears to have closed shortly afterwards, around 1875, as rising costs at depth outran the value of ore raised — the same pattern the 1862 account had already anticipated, noting that 'when a mine — and particularly a lead mine — has to continue sinking pretty smartly to keep them up, profits generally become small by degrees and beautifully less.' The site passed into private ownership and the old workings lay undisturbed for over a century. From 2003 to 2012 a volunteer group, working most Sundays with the permission of the landowner Geoffrey Crocker, dug out the old Footway Shaft in search of mineral specimens and the buried adit; the project ended in 2012, defeated by persistent water ingress before the shaft could be fully cleared. It was during this excavation, in November 2007, that a trench collapse trapped one of the volunteers and triggered a multi-agency rescue — see Disasters, below.

Geology

Le Neve Foster's 1874 account, based on observation at the 250 fathom level, described a fissure vein whose filling recorded at least two episodes of opening. An initial fracture, accompanied by a shift in the surrounding killas (clay-slate), left an irregular open space later cemented by a chalcedonic 'cab' that incorporated angular fragments of the wall rock into a breccia, chiefly on the footwall side. The fissure then reopened — sometimes along the middle of the existing cab, sometimes cutting across it to follow one of the original walls — and the resulting spaces were filled successively with vitreous quartz, galena, chalybite (spathose iron) and calc spar. Specimens Foster examined showed at least two distinct periods of fluorspar deposition bracketing the main phase of lead-ore formation. He judged the sequence of deposition at Wheal Mary Ann worth recording in detail because it had not previously been illustrated in section, despite the lode itself having already been described by earlier writers including William Jory Henwood.

Geological setting: Hydrothermal Deposits (well documented example), Veins and Lodes (well documented example)

Workings

The worked lode ran generally 20-25° west of south through the productive upper and middle levels, with an average underlie east of about 15 inches per fathom, and was cut off southward at depth by a band of disturbed 'slidy' ground comparable to that met in the Herodsfoot lode — a trial to get through it at the 110 fathom level was never successful. Deeper still, at the 250 fathom level, C. Le Neve Foster in 1874 recorded the lode running close to true north and dipping east at 60-80°, from 0 to 3 feet wide between killas walls. Two shafts did the principal work: Clymo's, engine and drawing, and Pollard's, both perpendicular and, by 1863, sunk 205 fathoms from surface with 10ft by 8ft compartments. Barratt's shaft, sunk on the course of the lode nearer the Trelawney boundary, served the northern workings. Pumping was originally shared between a 46-inch engine at Pollard's and an 80-inch engine at Clymo's — built by West of St Blazey and described in 1862 as 'among the finest in the county' — with the plan to retire the older engine once the two shafts were fully connected and drainage consolidated through Clymo's alone. A 24-inch double whim engine drew ore from both shafts, a 22-inch horizontal engine drove the crushing and stamping machinery, and six water wheels, turned by water pumped from underground, did further dressing work. A dedicated footway shaft, perpendicular for six fathoms then inclining at 4ft per fathom, gave the men a separate route down to the adit and, from the 90 fathom level, through a series of winzes to the workings below.

Closure

No source gives an exact closure date; Le Neve Foster's October 1874 description of the mine as 'on the point of being abandoned' and the absence of any later working account point to closure around 1875, consistent with the wider collapse of Cornish lead mining through the 1870s as ore grades and prices fell against the cost of working ever deeper ground.

What remains

The mine lies on private land. Surface access to the underground workings is through the Footway Shaft, part-cleared by a volunteer group between 2003 and 2012: by the end of that project the shaft had been dug, timbered and laddered to roughly 54ft below its collar, with a short side tunnel yielding specimens of pyromorphite, wulfenite and galena. Persistent water ingress from the adit below defeated repeated attempts to pump the shaft dry, and the dig was abandoned in 2012 with the workings still flooded at depth.

No engine houses or stacks survive at Wheal Mary Ann's own shafts; the site's principal visible remains are the re-opened, timbered and scaffolded Footway Shaft and its associated adit portal, both the result of the 2003-2012 volunteer excavation rather than original 19th-century structures.

Abandoned workings can be dangerous — unstable ground, uncapped shafts, flooding and bad air are common even where a site looks safe from the surface. This entry describes history and general location only; it is not an access guide.

The site is on private land and the workings are unstable and part-flooded. A 2007 trench collapse here seriously injured an experienced volunteer and required a multi-agency rescue including an RAF helicopter — see Disasters, below.

Disasters & major incidents

• Wheal Mary Ann Footway Shaft Rescue
  13 November 2007 · Collapse / Roof Fall · 0 fatalities
  A volunteer clearing the Footway Shaft at the disused Wheal Mary Ann (recorded in the Cornwall Fire & Rescue Service's own report as 'St Mary's Lead Works') was trapped chest-deep when part of a drainage trench collapsed on him, triggering a rescue involving Cornwall Fire & Rescue Service, paramedics, an RAF Sea King helicopter and the Cornwall Air Ambulance.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each attached to the source(s) that support it below. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• The Wheal Mary Ann sett was granted in July 1845 to Peter Clymo, James Clymo and Edward Lyne, who the Trelawney adventurers understood to be acting on the company's behalf, but who proposed to keep a majority of the new mine's shares themselves; a Chancery suit followed and was resolved by arbitration in the Trelawney shareholders' favour in October-November 1846, with Clymo and Lyne ordered to pay costs of around £1,500. ^1,2
• By September 1859 the mine had paid total dividends of £48,512, equivalent to £47 7s 6d on each original share — about six times the capital subscribed. ³
• In 1862, sixteen years into working, monthly returns were about 60 tons of best ore (c. £25/ton) and 25 tons of seconds (c. £10/ton), raised from workings reaching a nominal 216 fathoms below surface (186 fathoms below adit) at the bottom of Clymo's shaft. ⁴
• An 1863 inspection for Lord Kinnaird's Royal Commission on the condition of mines recorded both Pollard's and Clymo's shafts, perpendicular and 10ft by 8ft, sunk 205 fathoms from surface and communicating with one another. ⁵
• C. Le Neve Foster observed the lode underground at the 250 fathom level in October 1874 and described the mine as 'on the point of being abandoned' — the latest firm date any source gives for active working. ⁶
• The BGS/Mining Remediation Authority mine plans catalogue holds records for Wheal Mary Ann, custodied by the Coal Authority; none currently has a publicly viewable scan. ⁷

Photographs & further reading

This page doesn't try to reproduce everything — these are the best original sources found for this mine.

Sources

1. (primary) Wheal Mary Ann: how the mine started — The Mining Journal, 26 July 1845 (republished by minecaptain.plus.com)
2. (primary) Trelawney and Mary Ann Mines: Smith v. Lyne and Others — The Mining Journal, 31 October & 21 November 1846 (republished by minecaptain.plus.com)
3. (primary) Testimonial to Captain Clymo, Wheal Mary Ann — The Mining Journal, 17 September 1859 (republished by minecaptain.plus.com)
4. (secondary) Wheal Mary Ann — The Mining and Smelting Magazine, vol. 2, 1862 (republished by minecaptain.plus.com)
5. (primary) Report on an Inspection of the Mine, December 1863 — Lord Kinnaird's Royal Commission on the Condition of Mines, published 1864 (republished by minecaptain.plus.com)
6. (primary) Remarks on the Lode at Wheal Mary Ann, Menheniot — C. Le Neve Foster, Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, 30 October 1874 (republished by minecaptain.plus.com)
7. (primary) Wheal Mary Ann mine plan records — British Geological Survey / Mining Remediation Authority mine plans catalogue

Record created: 26 August 2026 · Last researched: 26 August 2026